How the lemon was invented (2018)
trueorbetter.com
trueorbetter.com
Well, not quite… there’s a bunch of other, more niche Citrus species too. For instance, here in Australia you might see finger limes (Citrus australasica) now and again. But it’s true that all the most widespread citruses are hybrids of those three.
but mostly for thgose who like pulp. The corpuscles in pomelo are huge - and its super delicious.
Highly recommend (its basically a gigantic 'orange' with its own flavor.
If you get a juicy one though they really are amazing.
edit: ok, according to Wikipedia, "pomelo" is an ancestor of grapefruit. But in Spanish, "pomelo" is grapefruit.
Now there is definitely room for more than one of us to be right but I thought I should mention it.
In Argentinian Spanish, "pomelo" is 100% "grapefruit". I'm sure of this: I'm Argentinian.
But yes, it's likely that we are both right and in Cuba this isn't the case!
So thankfully no sex with grapefruits is strictly necessary.
I would also plug "Weird explorer" playlist on citrus[1]. His youtube channel where he tries to cover as much fruits as he can(his estimate is around 1% of all fruits)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkMKJCvJKBk
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diy5s8_gNYM&list=PLvGFkMrO1Z...
!ud OG -> "original gangster"
Which gives:
90s gang affiliated rappers called themselves "Original Gangsters" or "OG" for short. It's a title for real, actual crime and gang affiliated gangsters.
<https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Original%20G...>
"OG" as others have noted has come to mean simply "original".
To this day - I LOVE grapefruit in all forms... it sucks to think that there may be a time in the future where I cant eat it.
It's a lot easier to say "don't eat grapefruit" than it is to explain that "eat exactly the same amount every day" is not a lighthearted joke.
One source wisely suggests asking your doctor.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
Another has big words that needs a bit more time to digest.
Grapefruit juice–drug interactions https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1...
I mean, we do give drugs that have primarily renal excretion to people with nonfuctioning kidneys. After we consult a pharmacist, of course.
And I have no control over my patients' behaviors, because I don't meet them until the day of surgery. I already have to take them as they are. I might delay or cancel a case if someone isn't optimized, but sometimes "really bad" is as good as they will ever be.
Super sad and dark.
The American Society of Anesthesiologists has a Physical Status that is part of every pre-op examination we do.
ASA 1: a normal healthy patient. (You almost never see these.)
ASA 2: A patient with mild systemic disease.
ASA 3: A patient with severe systemic disease. Subtext of the definition of this class notes that it causes some impairment of function. This is our most common class.
ASA 4: A patient with severe systemic disease that is a constant threat to life.
ASA 5: A moribund patient who is not expected to survive without the operation.
ASA 6: A declared brain-dead patient whose organs are being removed for donor purposes.
There's a bit of personal style in there - my 4 might be someone else's 3 - but it's a shorthand way of saying "they're very sick". A 5 is someone who is actively trying to die.
From what I've read there are two ways grapefruit interferes with medication.
1. For some drugs, such as statins, those drugs are broken down by certain enzymes. Grapefruit interferes with those enzymes, resulting in more of the drug circulating in your body. In effect it is as if you took a larger does of the drug.
2. For some drugs, fexofenadine is a common example, those drugs rely on certain transporters that move the drug into cells. Grapefruit interferes with those transporters, resulting in less of the drug reaching cells. In effect it is as if you took a smaller dose of the drug.
It sounds like this would be sensitive to timing.
It's complex, and yes, you would have to eat the same amount every day at the same time as you take the drug to be sure.
As I said, it's a lot easier to say "don't eat it".
I am a doctor. Don't ask a doctor. Ask a small-store (NOT CVS or Walgreens, they don't have the time) pharmacist and tell them they can get back to you later with the answer.
i LOVE THE UNINTENDED PUN IN THIS COMMENT (oops on caps)
The reason is that after my grandfather passed, my grandmother (who a life-long nurse) got together with Francis Stutsman, one of the top cardiologists in the nation (and former mayor for Saratoga California - they were life-long tennis friends) and he had a famous joke ;; (he also is the biggest Pistachio grower in California)
"Well, as your cardiologist, I am happy to tell you that your heart will last you the rest of your life.... which might be three months."
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and...
(Guess there might be regional differences to the use though)
Apparently Volkswagen originated the term with respect to automobiles through a 1960s campaign (see: <https://www.madx.digital/learn/lemon-volkswagen-ad>), and George Akerlof's "The Market for Lemons" (1970, Nobel prize awarded in 2001).<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>
Relying on Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)>
Google's Ngram Viewer tends to support the timeline: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lemon+car&year...>
TIL indeed.
A similar scenario extends to the realm of fruits, vegetables and even grains, where the majority of what we consume today are far-removed variants of their wild counterparts, owing to selective breeding over centuries. Essentially, the food items that constitute our regular diets wouldn't exist in a truly untouched, natural environment.
Edit: I'm not saying that this is bad, just that it's interesting.
Not that much. You can eat almost any animal. You can even eat insects.
So why would it matter that a modern chicjen is different that it's ancestor? Assuming it has space to run around and is not factory farmed, it wouldn't matter.
it matters because of the long term effects on health and ecology
Cattle are an older species than humans.
> fish are the only remaining palatable animals most unfucked by humans
Hate to break it to you, but a non-insignificant portion of store bought fish was cultivated / farmed.
incorrect. humans tamed the aurochs around 10,000 years ago and the most common dairy cattle breed today, the Holstein, was bred around 2,000 years ago
>Hate to break it to you, but a non-insignificant portion of store bought fish was cultivated / farmed.
you're not really breaking anything. this is a completely different sense of "farming". their genetics and physiology have not been altered to the same extent as dairy cattle, nor do we interfere with their evolution by selectively breeding. "farmed" fish are not fat and docile. so any fish you eat today is likely to be the same fish you would have eaten 300,000 years ago
You are flat wrong.
Jenny tell ya that?
Yeah, fuck the planet! “31% of the world's wild fish stocks are estimated to be overfished, 58% fully exploited” and we fish for huge amounts of non-edible fish as a feedstock for aquaculture. Discl: I do eat fish.
I imagine aqua feedstock is comprised of castoffs from the fishing industry, similar to cat/dog food
global landings of forage fish have trended downward (Extended Data Fig. 2), reflecting full to overexploitation, and harvest restrictions (for example, in Peru) to prevent fishing above maximum sustainable yield levels.
the annual catch of forage fish used to make fishmeal and fish oil decreased from 23 Mt to 16 Mt (refs. 47,48) (Extended Data Fig. 3). Global production of fishmeal from capture fisheries and trimmings decreased over the same period from 6.6 to 4.8 Mt (ref. 17). The production of fish oil declined from around 1.5 to 1.0 Mt and has been stable around 1.0 Mt during the past decade.
Figures do seem to show that most ocean fishing is for human consumption, but 16Mt of forage fishing is still more than a single digit percentage of total ocean fishing.
About 75% of fish meal is used for farm fisheries (aquaculture), the other 25% for animal farming on land.
Thank you - it is always good to be induced to double-check my assumptions! I don’t really know much about the topic except from some shallow googling (but that still makes me more knowledgeable than most).
I totally agree land farming is mostly very damaging, but it is visible and an individual can potentially control their impact on land. The damage by ocean fisheries and aquaculture is largely invisible, and it is very difficult to control an individual’s impact when eating fish: and unobviously the impact is very heavy.
I think the original point is that virtually everything we eat has "characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history" because the animals and plants we eat have been bred for various characteristics so extensively, so simply avoiding "highly processed foods" doesn't meant that we're eating the types or quantities of foods that humans would have for almost our entire existence
But nobody evolved to eat large quantities of deep fried chicken.
Did your ancestors really eat sourdough for thousands of years in ancient Egypt, or were they hunters or fishermen until more recent times? Agriculture was common but there are societies that don't depend on agriculture, even today.
But isn’t that the tricky part: how do you figure out what is “right”? If you eat synthesized sugar and vitamin C in place of an orange, is it really the same thing? Perhaps the fiber or some other minerals in the orange affect how your body processes and digests the nutrients.
Nutrition is pretty complex and until we know what “right” is, I’d think it’s generally a safer bet to stick with foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds or thousands of years, rather than recently devised nutritive cocktails.
Most modern foods (including unprocessed meat and plants) have only been around for a few hundred years or so.
Not evolutionary change - a. different variery of wheat in your bread.
Personally I also think there is a big difference between selective breeding, and distilling foods into constituent parts in order to recombine in various ways. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but I don't fully trust humans to understand and play that part of nature just yet.
Classic example being how evolving with meat doesn’t make saturated fat good for us in the long term. And, further, replacing it with modern unsaturated fats (like canola oil) improves health outcomes. Your heuristic of "we've eaten it for a long time so it must be better" doesn't capture that.
Frankly, it seems inevitable that the optimal diet (one that maximizes health through all stages of life) will be a modern artificial one since it seems at its root just a technological problem. But we certainly aren't there yet where we can replace an orange with a synthetic orange pill. That is an interesting world to ponder though.
I think the point is that our conception of which foods are the most "natural" isn't really coherent in the first place.
But on the other hand, why consider domestic/bred species as "unnatural"? We exist in a symbiotic relationship with them, and there are symbiotic relationships all over nature.
If not strictly natural foods, then what? I can't stand supernatural foods - the ectoplasm really doesn't agree with me. I'd like to try preternatural foods, but I've never been able to find a genuinely miraculous grower or farm to get them from.
there's still animals in the wild though, that get hunted and eaten
Broccoli for example is only about 2000 years old via an aggressive selective breeding of mustard/brassica, and no modern grain genetics are more than a few thousand years old with the last known distinct genetics being only 12000 years old.
The Anthropocene is everywhere you look when you start really looking
It's like how poodles, corgis, Great Danes, and dachshunds are all just dogs.
It blows a lot of people's minds when I tell them.
The Myanese (or Burmese if you prefer) have been calling it Myanmar in English since 1989 - I think just about everyone uses that except the US government nowadays don't they?
“In the Myanmar language, Burma is known as Myanmar Pyi (မြန်မာပြည်). Myanmar Pyi is the written, literary name of the country, while Bama is the spoken name of the country. Burmese… has different levels of register, with sharp differences between literary and spoken language.”
English doesn’t have such distinctions, so that partly explains why we get so confused about the name.
It's been submitted to HN quite a few times.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831830-600-why-the-...
(this is a joke. I'm joking. I think)
Seriously though, I wish that wasn't paywalled. Sounds like a really interesting bit of story.
https://gastropod.com/museums-mafia-secret-history-citrus/
"A slice of lime in your cocktail, a lunchbox clementine, or a glass of OJ at breakfast: citrus is so common today that most of us have at least one lurking on the kitchen counter or in the back of the fridge. But don't be fooled: not only were these fruits so precious that they inspired both museums and the Mafia, they are also under attack by an incurable immune disease that is decimating citrus harvests around the world. Join us on a historical and scientific adventure, starting with a visit to the ark of citrus—a magical grove in California that contains hundreds of varieties you've never heard of, from the rose-scented yellow goo of a bael fruit to the Pop Rocks-sensation of a caviar lime. You'll see that lemon you're about to squeeze in a whole new light."[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_life_gives_you_lemons%2C_...
> The preservation of the fruit juice was usually done through the addition of 15% rum.
So lime, rum, presumably also water? That's almost a mojito right there.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25447
> "To investigate the genetic diversity and evolutionary history of citrus, we analysed the genomes of 58 citrus accessions and two outgroup genera (Poncirus and Severinia) that were sequenced to high coverage, including recently published sequences as well as 30 new genome sequences described here... We identified ten progenitor citrus species by combining diversity analysis, multidimensional scaling and chloroplast genome phylogeny."
I... what? Other languages use different words for the different fruits, too.
I was curious because I swear I’ve heard somewhere that the English word for the fruit is where the color gets the name, though I could be making that up, and was curious if that originated in other languages.
Limes did not work to prevent scurvy. Steam ships just happen to be fast enough that nobody noticed. This is why everyone in Scott’s polar expedition got scurvy - limes didnt work, but they thought they would.
https://timharford.com/2022/08/cautionary-tales-south-pole-r...
There is no single fruit called just "lime", its a category of fruits which includes key limes.
However, it is true that some fruits still have a sour taste when ripe, but fruits like lemons, which are very sour from beginning to end, are not common.